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Travel through time with Java

Explore a simple Java-based technique for visiting the past and the future

By Jeff Friesen, JavaWorld.com, 02/13/06

Many people are fascinated with the possibility of traveling through time. Over the years, a considerable number of television shows and movies have been created to exploit this fascination. Two of these movies, along with a third movie that appears to be under development, focus on two alleged time-travel events occurring in 1943 and 2000:

• The Philadelphia Experiment: In 1943, the United States Navy supposedly tested technology for making a warship invisible to radar and floating mines. The ship used in the test was the U.S.S. Eldridge. During the test, the U.S.S. Eldridge disappeared and reappeared about four hours later. Some of the sailors were found fused to the ship, some sailors were on fire, some had heart attacks, others appeared to be insane, and a few sailors seemed to disappear without ever being seen again. Legend has it that this ship traveled forty years into the future and ended up in Montauk, New York, prior to its return. Learn more about the Philadelphia Experiment by visiting Resources. Also, you might want to watch the 1984 The Philadelphia Experiment and 1993 Philadelphia Experiment II movies.
• John Titor's arrival: On November 2, 2000, someone calling himself Timetravel_0, and later on John Titor, began posting on a public forum that he was a time traveler from the year 2036. He posted pictures of his time-travel device and its operations manual, answered various questions about life in his time, and made various predictions of future events, including a woman president in 2008—some of these predictions have already manifested themselves. John mentioned visiting his parents and his younger self, and, on March 21, 2001, announced his upcoming departure back to the future. John has not been heard from since. If you Google the Internet, you will discover many Websites, including the official John Titor Website (see Resources for a link), that are devoted to this unusual character. The John Titor Website mentions that a movie about John Titor is in the works.

Scientists believe you need a wormhole (or some other exotic device) to travel through time. But in 2002, I discovered another way to visit the past and any one of the many possible futures. All this computer-based technique requires is an appropriate programming language, such as Java. I prefer to use Java because Java's support for big integers and buffered images greatly facilitates the implementation of this technique.

It's all about pictures

You have probably heard someone refer to a picture as being worth a thousand words. Pictures save people time by sparing them from having to accurately describe, via many spoken words, what those pictures express. Perhaps even more importantly, pictures are windows into the past. Whenever you look at a picture, you are looking back in time to the moment when that picture was taken. From that perspective, you are traveling back in time. Confused? Sit back, close your eyes, and think about this concept before continuing to read this article.

 

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